How to accelerate change towards sustainability?

There is growing recognition that achieving prosperity within environmental limits requires fundamental changes in core systems of production and consumption. A new European Environment Agency (EEA) report identifies ten focus areas for enabling sustainability transitions.

Focusing in particular on Europe’s food, energy and mobility systems, the EEA report ‘Sustainability transitions: policy and practice’ illustrates the importance of promoting diverse innovations — social practices, business models, technologies — that can trigger new ways of living and thinking. It points to the critical need to empower cities as hubs of innovation and networking, to reorient financial flows towards sustainable and transformative innovations, to navigate inevitable surprises and trade-offs, and to ensure socially fair outcomes.

The report also emphasises that achieving sustainability transitions requires that all policy areas and levels of government operate together to harness the creativity and power of citizens, businesses and communities. Environment and climate policy tools remain essential but transforming systems also requires coherent contributions from many other areas, ranging from research and innovation, industry, competition and trade, to employment, education and welfare.

Read and download the EEA report: Sustainability transitions: policy and practice.

Original source: European Environment Agency
Published on 10 September 2019